Fall is here. The
calendar tells me this. And if I didn’t
have a calendar, I could just step out the door. The maple trees have peaked. Their leaves are a solid red and yellow and are
falling continuously like colorful snow.
And while the leaves are falling in the woods, the feathers are falling
unabated in the coop as the fall molt I talked about in Tuesday’s post continues.

One of the projects I work on this time of year is my on-going battle with buckthorn, an invasive alien plant. Buckthorn was first brought here from Europe
in the mid-1800’s for use as a hedge plant.
Buckthorn makes a great hedge because of its long thorns, its ability to
form an impenetrable barrier and its ability to grow prolifically almost
anywhere. It has become a terrible
scourge because of its long thorns, its ability to form an impenetrable barrier
and its ability to grow practically anywhere.
Once it becomes established, it outcompetes practically everything so no
other plants grow and eventually you have a forest of buckthorn. And it’s so thick and prickly that nothing
can get through it—it isn’t even suitable for wildlife habitat. You know the thick enchanted forest that grew
around the castle in Sleeping Beauty? I
think that probably was buckthorn.

Here on the ranch, I’ve managed to keep buckthorn completely under
control on part of the property. There
are other parts where it’s partially controlled—all the remaining plants are
small, far apart, and periodically rooted out.
Then there are about three acres of wasteland—oak forest above with an
under-story of solid buckthorn hell. I’m
in my second year of full retirement and during the last two falls I have laid siege
to the wasteland. It is a battle. This is essentially a three-acre hedge—the buckthorn
plants are spaced, for the most part, less than a foot apart. And the big ones have grown way beyond hedge
size—some are 25-30 feet high. These are
literally buckthorn trees! There’s no way these monsters can be pulled
by hand, but my trusty John Deere handles them.
So with tractor, brush cutter, chainsaw, and the sparing use of
herbicide, I’m making progress. And it’s
not unpleasant work. Eradicating
invasive plants has the aura of important and meaningful work. And it’s the sort of work where I can
clearly see the progress I’ve made. Plus
it’s just pleasant to be in the woods this time of year. Today there was a flock of hundreds if not
thousands of migrating robins poking through the underbrush to keep me company while I
worked.

It's hard to see the trees for the forest, but this is all buckthorn

My trusty John Deere sits in a cleared area of the buckthorn thicket - This 25 ft. tall beauty is on the way to the brush pile

Another project that’s underway is the building of a new hen
pen. The chickens in the two coops take
turns, every other day, going into the half-acre chicken run. On the days that they’re not in the big
chicken run, the 15 chickens in the big coop spend their outdoor time in the 450
square foot hen pen. When the 9 chickens
in the small coop aren’t in the big chicken run, the outdoor space they have to hang out in is the 16
square foot “chicken patio”. That space
was fine when it was just Snowball, Emily, and Angitou. But then Courtney came along, and then her
four surrogate Legbar babies grew to adulthood, and then Willow the buff
Orpington was having interpersonal issues in the big coop and got moved to the
small coop, and suddenly the outdoor space that was OK for three small chickens
is embarrassingly inadequate for nine birds.
So I’ve finally got started on building them their own outdoor hen pen. It’s going in along the side of the pole barn,
and since it’s at the base of a steep hill, the first thing I had to do was
excavate some dirt to make a level space.
Next I need to put up a retaining wall and haul in some class five
gravel. Only then can the fence go up. The leaves are falling. Will this project be done before the snow
falls? Stay tuned.

Some of the hens explore the trench that I've excavated along the side of the pole barn for the new hen pen. They don't have a clue what I'm up to, but they certainly enjoy all that fresh dirt to scratch in! The trench is filling with falling leaves. Hopefully some progress will be made before it fills with falling snow.

On to the chicken news:They are all healthy now, thank goodness!But there have been a couple of weird traumas
this past week.On Wednesday, when I was
cleaning the coop I noticed that some of the bedding under the roost was
bloody.Then when I looked carefully at
the roost itself, I noticed a fair amount of blood smeared on the rungs of the
roost—a disturbing situation to say the least.With all the molting that's going on, I expected that the blood would be from bleeding pin feathers. Pin feathers have a copious blood supply bringing nutrients to the forming feathers and they can become injured quite easily. I gave the chickens a once over and didn't see damaged pin feathers or any other sort of injury. They all seemed fine.It took until bedtime for me to figure out
that the blood was coming from a deep cut on the toe of Carmen Maranda the
cuckoo Marans hen, and that it was still oozing blood.On closer examination I saw that not only was
there a deep cut on top of the back toe on her left foot, but that the toenail
was completely cut off.I decided to
wait until morning before taking any action. And in the morning a good solid scab had formed and it looked like it was on a positive track to healing. And so far there’s no sign of infection.Since chickens spend their lives scratching in the dirt, they’ve evolved
a pretty robust immune system, and as Carmen demonstrated in this situation,
often an injury or abrasion such as this doesn’t need any outside interference,
but will do just fine if left alone.The
question that remains is how she got cut in the first place.Some random piece of glass or other sharp
object buried in the run?It’s a
half-acre run, but I’ll keep my eyes open.

Carmen Maranda the cuckoo Marans hen: Wounded, but walking

The other bizarre chicken run
situation happened yesterday. The run is
enclosed with a four-foot high wire fence topped by an additional four feet of
netting. On my way to the coop for my
post-lunch check-in with the chickens (aka “the chick-in”) I saw the alarming
sight of a chicken hanging from the fence.
It was Nicky the Cream Legbar pullet.
Somehow she must have flown right at
the fence and gotten herself tangled up in the netting. The netting had sagged a little under her weight, so she was being
supported somewhat by the netting “pocket” that her body had formed—but mostly
she was hanging by her leg. I quickly
grabbed her and the netting and set her free.
She is fine. The netting,
unfortunately, needed some splicing. No
chicken has ever done this
before. Was this a learning experience
for Nicky? Time will tell.

The biggest topic of conversation amongst the Hipster Hens
these days is the fall molt. As summer
wanes, the shortening days are a signal to chickens everywhere that it is time to drop
their feathers and grow new ones that will help them get through the upcoming cold winter. Each chicken has thousands
of feathers, and each one will drop so it can be replaced. Needless to say, the coop is taking on the
appearance of the aftermath of a pillow fight gone really wrong. And then there are all those hens wandering around
looking embarrassingly disheveled. Not all
hens start molting at the same time, nor do they all molt at the same rate, but
many of them have bare patches of skin right now and others look like porcupines as the pin feathers that will eventually grow into real feathers emerge from
their skin.

Feathers in the Dust Bath: The hens can "wash" off a lot of feathers while dust bathing

The rule of thumb is that the ugliest hens at molting time
are the best egg-laying hens. Egg and
feathers are both mostly composed of protein, so a hen needs lots of protein to
produce both, and if she’s making a lot of feathers, it would be really hard to
make eggs at the same time. So egg
production falls off dramatically during the molt. The good layers drop a lot of feathers all at
once and get their molt over with in a couple of months, while the poor egg
layers molt more gradually—they can take as long as six months. They eventually resume laying eggs when they’re
completely satisfied that each feather is in place and their plumage is impeccably
perfect. So all those pretty hens with
the sleek and glossy feathers are generally real slackers in the egg-laying
department.

Veronica Molts: Veronica, my most heavy-hitting green egg layer, sprouts pin feathers in a patch that was bare skin just a few days ago.

The egg count yesterday was seven, by the way. Seven eggs for the entire flock! And four of them came from the four Legbar
pullets. The Legbars won’t molt and
should keep their production up through the entire winter. Why?
Well, these girls are just six months old. They’ve already gone through several “juvenile
molts” in the first six months of their lives and are good to go with the
feathers they’ve got until they’re 18 months old a year from now. Then they’ll
have their first adult molt along with all the other hens. And because they’re young and vigorous, I
should be getting an egg almost every day from each of them until then.

Paulette, Nicky, and Marissa: No molt for the Legbar pullets!

While it is unusual, hens sometimes go through molts at times
of the year other than fall. For
instance, I reported on Angitou
molting in May and Arlene
molting in July. Chickens that molt
mid-year may or may not molt again in the fall—it depends on the extent of
their molt, when it occurred and a whole slew of other variables. So far, Arlene is still laying and shows no
sign of molting. Angitou, on the other
hand, is not laying and is beginning
to look a little like a porcupine.
Mid-year molts are often stress-related and as I mentioned in my
first post in my series on cruel hen cages, the commercial egg industry use
this circumstance to force hens to molt.
All the hens in a flock don’t start their molt at the same time, and the
egg industry finds this imprecision annoying.
So hens in many commercial flocks are stressed by manipulating the
light, by withholding water, and by starving them. This practice is not legal in many countries
and the Egg
Bill that was before Congress in 2012 and 2013 that I reported on last week
would have made it an illegal practice in the U.S., but that legislation did
not pass. Needless to say, the Hipster
Hens don’t get that sort of treatment.

So what do I do with my molting Hipster Hens? Well, the poor girls need more protein to make all those feathers. Some folks start giving their hens all sorts of high-protein food like meal worms and even cat food. While hens love this kind of stuff, it's kind of pricey and too much over a long period of time can actually cause kidney damage, gout, and other problems. So I just switch to a commercial feed with a higher protein content. And I avoid handling them a lot. All those pin feathers are sensitive. They're called pin feathers, after all - and when a hen has a whole bunch of them sticking out of her skin, it probably feels just like you can imagine it would feel! And other than that, I just tell the girls to be patient and that they'll get through this - and when they're done they'll be covered from head to toe with shiny new feathers!

Read "Edging Away From Cruel Eggs: Part 2—Slogging Toward Enactment"Consumer polls have
consistently shown that the majority of egg buyers think that keeping hens in
small cages is cruel, that they would prefer to buy cage-free eggs, and that
they would be willing to pay more for them.
So when California voters passed Propostion 2, “Standards for Confining
Farm Animals” in 2008, an initiative that mandated more humane conditions for chickens by
2015, that’s when the egg industry should have gotten to work figuring out the
best way to give their customers what they wanted. Instead, what ensued was years of turmoil and
stress as most in the egg industry looked for every possible way to block the
changes required by Prop 2.

In Part
2 of this series, I wrote about how certain egg producers rolled out
“enhanced” cages as their answer to the required changes. In spite of the positive spin of their PR
fanfare, enhanced cages were really still just cages—they just gave each hen
slightly more space. I also discussed a
lawsuit filed in California State Court in 2010 by egg companies that argued
that the new rules were too vague because Prop 2 didn’t specifically say how
much space a chicken really needed. The
case was ultimately dismissed in 2011.

Chickens in Battery Cages (Wikipedia Commons - public domain)

It took less than a
year for the next legal challenge—this lawsuit was so very similar to the first
one that they could have been twins.William
Cramer, a trustee of a family business that owned egg farms in Riverside
County, filed his suit in Federal District Court.He claimed that Prop 2 violated the US
Constitution because its vagueness would prompt arbitrary enforcement.He maintained that most egg farmers would
stop operating rather than comply with the new regulations, which would result
in skyrocketing egg prices.The
Association of California Egg Farmers (ACEF) joined this suit just as it had the
previous one.

This lawsuit was not
successful, either. The case was heard
by U.S. District Court Judge John Walter who sounded a bit irritated in his
ruling, maybe because this ground had already been plowed in the previous
suit. Judge Walter ruled that "Proposition
2 establishes a clear test that any law enforcement officer can apply, and that
test does not require the investigative acumen of Columbo to determine if an
egg farmer is in violation of the statute.”
He dryly stated that "the mere fact that Plaintiff dislikes or
disagrees with the policy or language of Proposition 2 is not sufficient to
sustain a Constitutional challenge."

Before the dust had
settled on the U.S. district court case, ACEF filed another suit, this one in
the Superior Court of the State of California.
The charge this time? That the law
was too vague. It was déjà vu all over again! Again, the court ultimately ruled against
ACEF, declaring in their 2013 findings that “The fact that the statute defines confinement limitations in terms of
animal behaviors rather than in square inches or other precise measurements
does not render the statute facially vague.”

At the conclusion of the trial, Jonathan R. Lovvorn of The Humane
Society of the United States (HSUS) noted that the opponents of Prop 2 had
been allowed their day in court not once but three times and had not
prevailed. “Now…it’s time to get on with
the process of transitioning egg operations to meet the needs of animals and
the will of California voters,” he suggested.
“We sincerely hope the Court’s ruling will put this objection [of
vagueness] to rest once and for all.”

It did seem like it was time to get on with it. The inauguration date for the new law was now
less than two years away, and many in the egg industry had spent a lot of time
fighting it, but next to no time preparing for its institution.

Through the whole battle leading up to the vote for Prop 2 in California,
and in the years after it passed, HSUS
had tirelessly campaigned, raised funds, and had successfully defended it three
times in court. And simultaneous to the
fight in California, HSUS was pursuing a similar course to free chickens from
cages in other states. The biggest
adversary HSUS faced in most of these battles was the United Egg Producers (UEP), the country’s largest
egg production group. UEP represents egg farmers that raise over 90% of all the
egg-laying hens in the United States.

So, as you can imagine, everyone on both sides of the issue was shocked
when HSUS
and UEP joined forces in 2011 to pursue
federal legislation that would standardize cage sizes for laying hens, mandate
egg carton labeling to tell the buyer about the environmental conditions in
which the eggs in that carton were produced, and regulate other practices used
in chicken keeping.

No doubt the reason UEP came to the table was the fact that there was continually
increasing public pressure to liberate caged hens, the public pressure was
manifesting itself in legislation in California and other states, the cost of
the PR fight and litigation against the legislation was rising, and UEP was
continuing to lose ground.

HSUS undoubtedly joined forces with UEP because it saw an opportunity to
improve lives for chickens throughout the entire country in one fell swoop with
federal legislation.

The bill, simply called “The Egg Bill” was put before the 2012 Congress. It had a late start and it didn’t gain much
traction, but HSUS and UEP were back in 2013 with legislation that they hoped
would be added as an amendment to that year’s farm bill. Among other things the bill proposed that
battery cages be phased out over a twenty-year period and mandated that all egg
cartons contain labeling that would inform consumers about the treatment and
housing of the hens that produced the eggs.

A collaboration between opponents means compromise, and compromise, of
course, means concessions from both sides.
Many felt that HSUS gave up too much.
Perhaps the worst part of the bill in terms of chicken welfare was that
it allowed “enhanced” cages.” As I
pointed out in Part
2 of this series, “enhanced” cages are still cages. As author, Clare Druce, points
out, “Basically it’s still a battery cage, the birds living behind bars on
metal grid flooring, the cages stacked up in tiers, many thousands of hens to a
building.” While nest boxes are included
in these cages, Clare Druce explains that “It is simply a curtained area,
behind which the hen finds the same sloping cage floor, the metal grid now
covered in matting of some kind. Not a wisp of straw, no soft material with
which to arrange her nest. Some of the enriched colony cages I saw held up to
60 hens. Gleaming metal cages stretched away into the distance, and there was
that familiar unending clamor of frustrated hens’ voices.” And as is the case with battery cages, the
enhanced cages are over-packed with hens.
The legislation recognized that brown hens were larger than white hens,
thus brown hens were allowed 144 square inches but white hens were only given 124 square
inches. Most experts agree that a hen
needs at least 216 square inches for minimal normal behavior.

While some in the animal welfare community supported HSUS in this
endeavor, many others, including PETA, the Humane Farming Association, Friends
of Animals, and United Poultry Concerns opposed it and referred to the
legislation as “The Screaming Hen Bill” and “The Rotten Egg Bill.”

While HSUS and UEP, the proponents of the legislation, were indeed
strange bedfellows, those who jumped into the opposition bed were equally mismatched. The animal welfare groups were joined in
opposition by organizations like the American Farm Bureau, the National
Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and the National Pork Producers Council. These groups representing animal farmers were
all alarmed at the prospect that a federal law governing the treatment of chickens
would segue into laws regulating the treatment of all farm animals. The pork producers issued a statement that they
were “gravely concerned” that such legislation would “take away producers’
freedom to operate in a way that’s best for their animals.” In their contorted logic, the best thing for
their animals was not to have any laws that would guarantee their humane
treatment.

Due to the effort of the beef and pork lobbyists, a number of farm state
Senators said they would work to bring the entire Farm Bill down if the Egg Bill
amendment was part of it. In order to expedite the passage of the Farm Bill, Agriculture
Committee chair Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) and the primary author of the Egg Bill, Senator
Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) grudgingly allowed the Farm Bill to go forward without
the Egg Bill. In a bit of eleventh hour
drama, when the Farm Bill was headed to the floor in the House, Rep. Kurt
Schrader (D-OR) and Rep. Denham (R-CA) proposed adding the egg amendment to it,
and it quite likely would have passed, but the House Rules Committee denied
them the opportunity. So the Farm Bill
was passed by both houses of Congress without any provisions for hen welfare
and it ultimately was signed into law in that form by President Obama in
February of 2014. And since the UEP and
the HSUS didn’t extend their memorandum of understanding, the prospect of passing
any national legislation even in this diluted form that would protect
laying hens from living out their lives in cruel cages was dead in the water.

Next time: The California
Department of Food and Agriculture muddies the waters, a bunch of egg-producing
states bring suit, and Prop 2 finally
(gasp!) becomes law!

Emerging Infectious Diseases, a scientific
journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has
published yet
another scholarly article linking salmonella infections in humans with
backyard chickens. The October issue of
this respected publication includes an article entitled “Outbreaks of Human Salmonella
Infections Associated with Live Poultry, United States, 1990–2014.” The epidemiology in this article is pristine
and makes a clear connection between people infected with salmonella and their
chickens. But unhappily, there have been
several unfortunate consequences of this and other similar CDC studies.

First of all, the popular press has
gotten it’s clutches on this news nugget and raced right for the catchy
headline while ignoring the broader underlying message. Thus we have Huffington Post, under the
category of “weird news” shouting “Kissing
Chickens Can Spread Salmonella”; while CNN proclaims, “CDC
Report Crushes Your Chicken-Kissing Dreams”, and NPR coyly announces, “Chicken
Owners Brood Over CDC Advice Not To Kiss, Cuddle Birds”, and Jezebel
interjects, “Hey,
Don’t Kiss Chickens.” These
headlines would lead one to believe that chicken kissing was the main focus of the
study. Kissing chickens was listed as a
high risk behavior, but the percentage of people in the study who got
salmonella after kissing chickens (13%) was a fraction of those who acquired salmonella
after bringing chickens into their houses (46%). But then the popular press obviously thinks
chicken kissing is just plain weird while bringing a chicken into your house is
hardly worth an eye-roll.

The second problem I have with these
studies is that after the CDC has demonstrated a real problem, people getting
Salmonella from their backyard chickens, it takes the next step and offers
solutions. I’m sure that CDC consulted
with a broad range of individuals before proposing solutions, but did it
actually talk to anybody in the backyard-chicken-keeping community? From some of the suggested solutions I
suspect that it didn’t.

And that lack of dialogue is creating
the third problem: There is a growing
feeling among some in the backyard-chicken-keeping community that the CDC
recommendations for safely keeping chickens is just another example of
government intrusion into their lives.
One on-line comment: “They don’t
want the general public raising chickens!”
I’ve been waiting for someone to say, “They can have my chickens when
they pry them from my cold, dead hands,” but thus far that has not popped up.

Always wash your hands with soap and water right after touching
live poultry or anything in the area where they live and roam. I always wash my hands when I come into
the house after having been in the chicken coop. Do most chicken owners do this? I’m going to guess, “Probably not.” But speaking of washing your hands, many
people have dogs and cats living right in their houses with them. There’s probably a LOT of cat and dog
petting going on all the time. Cats
and dogs, by the way, can carry about a gazillion diseases that are
transmissible to humans. The
top five are hookworm, roundworms, toxoplasmosis, cryptosporidiosis,
and Lyme disease, but the list goes on to include a whole host of other
diseases that are rare but often fatal, including plague (aka Black Death). So does CDC recommend that you wash your
hands each and every time after interacting with your cat or dog? Well, yes, actually. Yes they do. Does anybody do this? I’m going to guess, “Probably not.” And what about washing your hands after
you’ve been in an area where cats and dogs “live and roam”? Yeah, right. Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here - I'm not unloading on cats and dogs--I've got several that live in my house, sleep in my bed, and walk on my face every day. I'm just taking issue with the way CDC seems to be singling out one domestic animal.

Do not let
live poultry inside the house, in bathrooms, or especially in areas where
food or drink is prepared, served, or stored. Here’s the deal. Most backyard chicken keepers know that
it is practically impossible NOT to bring chickens into their houses in
certain circumstances. Many folks
start their flocks with baby chicks.
Babies need heat, protection from drafts, and a controlled environment
that small backyard coops just can’t provide. I would guess that pretty much everybody
starts their babies in a box in the basement. By the same token, sick or injured birds
also need a controlled environment.
The most recent sick chicken to live in my basement was suffering
from myiasis, also known
as flystrike. She had maggot
infested wounds after flies laid eggs on her. She needed a fly-free environment—my basement
could provide that but my coop could not.

Don't let
children younger than 5 years, adults older than 65, and people with
weakened immune systems handle or touch chicks, ducklings, or other live
poultry. Is there
good science behind this recommendation?
Absolutely. Will everybody
say, “Wow! Look at this impressive
science! I’m gonna get right behind
this good advice!”? Abso-freakin-lutley
not! If you’ve got baby chicks you
think your kids aren’t going to want to play with them? Come on!
I reach the magical age of 65 next year. The chances of me giving up my flock
next year are slim to none - and slim just left town. As useful advice, this one ranks up there with a
bucket of warm spit.

If you
collect eggs from the hens, thoroughly cook them. Or if you buy them from a store. Or get them from a neighbor, or
whatever. Or we could figure out a
way to get control of this Salmonella problem and go back to the good old
days of homemade mayo, eggnog, and Hollandaise.

Don't eat or
drink in the area where the birds live or roam. Good advice. And then I go back to the dog and cat
thing in #1.

Avoid kissing your birds or snuggling them,
then touching your mouth. Good
advice. And then I go back to the
cat and dog thing in #1.

Stay outdoors when cleaning any equipment or
materials used to raise or care for live poultry, such as cages or feed or
water containers. I’ve
got running water in my coop, so no prob.
Most people probably have a garden hose at the very least. So this is doable. Not bad - there’s at least one bit of
advice in this list that can be practically carried out.

Buy birds from hatcheries that participate
in the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Poultry Improvement Plan
(USDA-NPIP) U.S. voluntary Salmonella Monitoring Program.
This program is intended to reduce the incidence of Salmonella in
baby poultry in the hatchery. Yes. Stop disease at the source. If you can eliminate Salmonella from
hatcheries and guarantee that all those babies people are bringing into
their backyards are Salmonella-free, it would effectively eliminate the
main source of Salmonella in backyard flocks. But here’s the problem. Hatcheries that participate in NPIP
inspections are tested for the presence of a few diseases: These include a few Mycoplasma diseases—bacterial diseases affecting poultry. Then there are certain strains of avian
influenza (low virulence bird flu). Finally, there are tests for a few of the Salmonellas. But certainly not all of the bajillion different Salmonellas that chickens can carry and pass
on to you. The other ones are not
in the NPIP guidelines and thus they're not tested for. So how valuable is this
recommendation? Remember the bucket
of warm spit? We’re kinda back to that.

CDC Advice on Poultry Keeping

Now I’m
going to say something that I think is really important, so I’m going to bold
it and italicize it for emphasis. Because
to me, this is the whole deal: If we
could eliminate Salmonella from backyard flocks, or better yet, ALL flocks, all
the CDC recommendations would be moot.
And while testing for and eradicating Salmonella from each backyard
flock would be expensive and logistically difficult, testing and eradication at
the source—the hatcheries and distributors—would provide a huge running start
to eliminating Salmonella. And the
mechanism for doing that, NPIP, is already in place—it just needs to be
broader, stronger, and more enforceable. I suspect that there are hatcheries and distributors out there that are not very keen on this approach and would apply all sorts of
political pressure against any legislation that would suggest it. So it’s a whole lot easier and cheaper for
government agencies like CDC to make lists of recommendations. And if you're the press, publishing articles against chicken
kissing probably actually sells copy. So
there you go.

The chief
author of the EID publication that set me off on this rant is Dr. Colin Basler,
a veterinarian and public health researcher who has done all sorts of good work
on a variety of zoonotic diseases. I
sent him an email after I read the article expressing many of the same issues
that I brought up in this post. I haven’t
heard back, but it would be nice if I did.
I realize that Dr. Basler doesn’t run the CDC, nor does he have the
ability to legislate public health policy.
But it would be nice to have somebody
in a position of authority recognize that since backyard flocks are growing in
popularity for a variety of reasons, all of them good, that the incidence of
poultry associated Salmonellosis will also continue to rise. And since “education” by issuing lists of
mostly impractical suggestions is not a good strategy for solving the problem,
maybe it is time to explore better solutions.

This is the story of
how one tenacious little red hen at death's door fought her way back to the land of the living.
I’ve excerpted a lot of stuff from a previous post I wrote on this story in order to tell the complete narrative
here. If you’ve read the previous post,
you are totally justified in skipping the first couple of paragraphs. I won’t
be offended.

The first sign that something was wrong with Roxie the Rhode
Island Red was the diarrhea. Diarrhea is hard to miss—you notice the loose stools in the coop, and you can spot the
perpetrator by finding the chicken with soiled feathers on her backside. When I
spot this on just one hen and it’s a new thing, I keep a watchful eye, but I
certainly don’t panic. Hens get
diarrhea—sometimes it’s just due to the heat or “something they ate” and
sometimes it’s due to something more serious. So I watch and wait. Roxie seemed bright-eyed and active so my concern
for her was mild at most.

A few days later, a Tuesday in mid-August, as I was cleaning
the coop, I noticed Roxie make a couple of attempts to hop the short distance
into a nest box and fail at both attempts.
This definitely raised my level of concern. So I corralled the little red hen and picked
her up for a quick exam. Her eyes were
bright, her comb was a nice bright red, and both her crop and her abdomen felt
normal—neither puffy nor distended. But
there was a lot of poopy feathers on her back side, so I flipped her over to
take a closer look and then audibly gasped.
She had become fly-blown. Here’s
the part you don’t want to read if you’re squeamish: Sometimes in the summertime certain flies
find their way to hens who are suffering from diarrhea. Flies, as we all know, love poop. So the female fly deposits her eggs on the
poop-laden feathers. When the maggots
hatch, they immediately burrow into the chicken’s skin and create bloody skin lesions
that are laden with thousands of maggots. A hen can go from normal to fly-blown in 24
hours, and can go from fly-blown to dead in an equally short period of time. Roxie’s back end was teeming with maggots. I immediately carried her to the house, took
her to the laundry room, and bathed her
several times in dog shampoo and water, removing all the poop and maggots that
I could find. There were a couple sizable
maggot-eaten lesions around her vent. I
trimmed the feathers around all the bad spots and treated them all with
Veterycin, a veterinary antiseptic.

Then I set up a sick-room in the basement: I put newspapers under a dog crate and
furnished the dog crate with a piece of 4x4 for a roost, a dish with some
chicken crumbles, and a small water fount filled with a probiotic/electrolyte
solution to get her diarrhea under control.
I installed Roxie into this space and she hopped onto the roost and
didn’t budge. She showed no interest in
the food or drink and simply roosted with her head and tail down and her eyes
closed. This poor hen was in pain. I gave her a couple drinks of the electrolyte
solution using a syringe, but mostly left her alone. But I certainly didn’t stop thinking about
her.

On Wednesday morning I gave Roxie a Betadine soak followed
by a bath, a blow dry, and more Veterycin. There were two maggot lesions near her vent. The
smaller lesion seems to be healing. I found maggots in the large lesion, but
just a few this time. She hadn’t touched her food, so I mixed up some oatmeal
and she gobbled that right up. The
newspapers under the crate were soaked with green tinged fluid--This bird’s stomach was so empty that all
that was coming through was bile-tinged water.
No wonder she was weak and in pain!
I noticed her drinking several times throughout the day, so felt like
maybe she was making a little progress, but she would not eat at all—not even
when I offered her more oatmeal. What
awful gastrointestinal disease did this little girl have? There are about a million things that can
cause a chicken to have bad diarrhea.
Many diarrheal diseases are caused by biological agents: worms and other parasites, viruses, bacteria,
and fungi. Just to take a stab in the
dark, I mixed up some Duramycin.
Duramycin is a veterinary antibiotic—a form of tetracycline—it would
only be helpful if Roxie’s disease was bacterial, but it at least made me feel
like I was doing something useful. I
decided to hold off on giving her the antibiotic until the next day,
though. Antibiotics should not be
administered casually, and I hoped that she would show signs of progress on her
own.

Roxie looks things over after her morning betadine soak, bath, and blow dry.

Thursday morning Roxie showed no improvement. She was still sitting lethargically on her
roost, and hadn’t touched her food. I
gave her another bath and blow dry.
Roxie actually loved her bath and blow dry.
As foreign as getting dunked into a tub of water must be for a chicken,
she actually relaxed. I suppose the
warm water and blowing air just felt good.
After the blow dry I checked her lesions and was pleased to see that
both of them seemed to be healing nicely.
Then, when I turned her bottom-side-up to apply more Veterycin something
interesting happened. Fluid trickled out
of her beak and onto the floor. I tipped
her over a second time and a lot of
fluid gushed out of her beak.

There was a strong, nasty odor emanating from the pool on
the floor--It smelled just like sour beer.
Have you ever tasted sour beer? It’s
one of the trendy brews showing up at all the best brew pubs and microbreweries
and is characterized by its intentionally sour taste. I think the taste and smell of sour beer is very
unpleasant, so maybe that’s why it came to mind when I got the first whiff of
the nasty puddle of chicken emesis. Unfortunately,
I’m sure the next time I sample a sour beer in some tony brew pub, the Roxie
puddle will immediately spring to mind.
Then then I can arrogantly comment to the resident cicerone, “Ah! This beer has a bright flavor reminiscent of
chicken vomit with a subtle basement floor finish.” But actually…the yeasty odor was making alarm
bells go off in my head. Roxie’s crop
had been empty when I did my first exam in the coop. Now, as I felt the right side of the base of
her neck, I felt her crop making a large squishy bulge. As I pushed at her bulging crop, more vile
fluid came flowing out of her mouth, and again I was hit by the smell of sour
beer. Sour beer and maybe some notes of
oatmeal stout. The only thing Roxie had eaten since I took her out of the coop was
oatmeal, which she should have long since digested. I suddenly knew exactly
what was wrong with this hen. Roxie had
sour crop!

Roxie cuddled in a towel post-bath & right before I realized what her illness was

Before I talk about sour crop, I should first explain about
crops and say a few words about a chicken’s digestive system. When a hen has her morning breakfast of
delicious crumbles, each time she swallows, the crumbles travel down her
esophagus to a small pocket at the base of her neck. That’s her crop. The crop is basically a food storage pouch.
Some very basic digestion takes place there, mostly food softening. From her crop, the food passes into her
stomach, and then into her gizzard, a muscular pouch that mixes the food with
grit and grinds it. A hen doesn’t have
teeth, so she chews her food with her gizzard before it moves on to her small
intestine.

The symptoms of sour crop are exactly what I’ve just
described—a full, squishy crop, and the emanation of a bad smelling fluid from
the chicken's beak when you tip the chicken. I’ve
seen sour crop in my flock once before. When
Emile the rooster was just a teenage cockerel, shortly after I moved him into
the big coop, he got very sick with exactly the symptoms I’ve described. I was a novice chicken keeper then, and
surprised myself first by correctly diagnosing his illness, and then by saving
the little guy. I haven’t seen this
disease in my flock since Emile was stricken with it, so I decided it was time
to do some research. I turned to my copy
of the excellent “Chicken Health Handbook” by Gail Damerow, and, of course, to
the internet. My internet research
turned out to be an exercise in extreme frustration.

According to a recent UC Davis poll of backyard chicken
keepers in California, 87% percent of respondents say they use the internet as
the main source of information about poultry. And there are indeed some excellent blogs and websites that give good information
about all things poultry. I’ve
mentioned Terry Golson’s “Hen Cam” blog and Kathy Shea Mormino’s “Chicken Chick”
in a previous post. Both of these
bloggers give good information about chickens and rely on
veterinarians and other experts as their sources of information.

There are a host of other good chicken blogs, many of which
are well written, amusing, and have an interesting story to tell, but much of
the information given by these sites is specific to the life-lessons of the
individual blogger and not always scientifically verified. I include myself in this group of
bloggers. My career as a public health
microbiologist has given me a certain body of knowledge about infections and
infectious agents, but in general, since I am neither a veterinarian nor a
poultry expert, I present any information I share with the caveat that it is
only my own personal experience and is not intended as advice.

Then there are the forums where any random person who has a few
chickens roosting in the rusting car body on his front lawn can say any
ridiculous thing he wants. All he needs
is an internet connection. If he thinks
he can increase egg production by whacking his hens upside their feathered heads
with a two by four, he can say it in print for all to see. But I would take this advice with a grain of
salt.

By Googling “Sour Crop” I quickly accessed information from
all of these sources with their range of reliability. I found a ton of
information but much of it was confusing, and much of it was contradictory.

Many, but not all, information sources agreed that there
were at least two conditions affecting the crop that were separate from each
other but also related. “Sour crop,
or Candidiasis, is caused by an overgrowth of Candida albicans. Simply
put, it is a yeast infection inside the bird’s crop.”(Natural Chicken Keeping).
“Impacted crop is when something…gets
stuck in a tangled mess and blocks food from moving from the crop to the
stomach.” (Purposefully Simple). How are these conditions related? Some sources say that sour crop causes impacted
crop and other say the reverse—and some waffle on that very subject—it’s the
classic “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” situation. For example:
“Sour crop…occurs most often because of an impacted crop that hasn’t
been cleared, and yeast begins to grow and feed on the food that is stuck in
the crop.” (Purposefully Simple)
and “As the hen becomes infected with the fungus [i.e. yeast], the lining of her crop
thickens, and the infection can interfere with her crop’s ability to empty its
contents into her stomach. This can lead to an impacted crop.” (The Frugal Chicken) and “Sour crop may
also be associated with fungal infection, although there is some question about
whether the fungus causes the poor emptying of the crop, or is a result of it.”
(The Chicken Chick).

OK, let’s put the root cause and the order of sour crop and
impacted crop aside and move to the more important issue of how to treat. Again, there’s a lot of conflict.

“If you suspect sour crop, isolating your
chicken in a warm, quiet area, holding her upside down, gently massaging the
crop in the direction of the head and carefully trying to induce vomiting, encouraging yogurt,[my emphasis] olive oil [my emphasis] and water with
apple cider vinegar is a great way to start. Apple cider vinegar [my emphasis] is an anti-fungal, and often
avian vets will recommend it for cases of sour crop, since sour crop is
basically a yeast infection.”(Fresh
Eggs Daily)

"Sour crop can be helped by holding the bird
face-down, at about a 60 degree angle, and massaging the crop toward the
throat…the stinky mess should come out like vomit, and reduce the
swelling.Be sure to let the hen breathe
between bouts of massaging, and keep her inside for a couple of days after,
feeding soft foods and adding a little bit (1 tbsp/gallon) of baking soda to
the drinking water to combat the acidity.Do NOT use cider vinegar to treat
this, as it only adds to the acid burden.[my emphasis](The
Chicken Chick)

“A popular—but risky—method is to massage the
crop to loosen its contents while briefly…turning the chicken’s head downward
to try to drain out the contents…The chicken, however, runs the risk of
inhaling regurgitated crop contents.” (The Chicken Health Handbook)

“Be
advised, if you attempt to burp your chicken, there is a chance she will
aspirate some of the vomit, which can lead to death.” (The Frugal Chicken)

"Copper sulfate is commonly used to treat a
chicken with sour crop, but an overdose is toxic.To avoid overdosing, first prepare a stock
solution…Feed as usual while using the stock solution to treat the chicken’s
drinking water…Avoid using antibiotics which will make the condition worse…Adding vinegar[my emphasis] to the
water at a rate of 1 tablespoon per gallon…can help prevent a recurrence of
this infection.” (Chicken Health Handbook)

“I feed them eggs with a tablespoon of plain yogurt. [my emphasis] I just smash the
whole egg… shells and all - and stir in the yogurt.” (Natural Chicken Keeping)

“Dairy
productsincluding yogurt,
[my emphasis] milk and cheesecan give chickens diarrhea since they
aren't designed to digest the milk sugars, so go easy on the dairy if you
notice it's having a negative effect.” (Fresh
Eggs Daily)

" Give your
chickens yogurt? Why?[my emphasis] First, it's scientific fact that
chickens do not have the necessary enzymes in their gut to properly digest
dairy. Too much can and will give them diarrhea. So, why are you giving your
chickens yogurt?...For those of you that are going to post, "I've given my
chickens yogurt for 50 years with no problems," keep doing what your [sic]
doing, but for those of you that want to actually help your chickens, think
about using probiotics that are actually for chickens!" (The
Chicken Whisperer)

"Sprinkling a bit of cinnamon over some plain yogurt[my emphasis] and adding a drop
of oregano oil might be an option you would want to consider. (This is a good option for the oregano oil
since it's already diluted in olive oil.[my emphasis]) (Fresh Eggs Daily)

"You may be tempted to give mineral oil or other
liquid lubricants by mouth to break up an impaction. However, force-fed mineral
oil or other liquids may end up in the bird’s lungs, with a fatal result.
Mineral oil doesn’t help much to break up an impaction anyway (granite grit is more helpful than anything
else you can give [my emphasis]).(Chicken
Health for Dummies)

“The best
way to prevent impacted crop is to offer granite grit,[my emphasis] free
choice, and limit your chickens’ access to long dry straw or grass.” (Purposefully Simple)

"Impacted
crops are not caused by your birds needing more grit.[my emphasis]… Birds
use grit in their gizzards to grind food; but the gizzard is far
"downstream" from the crop. The crop is a kind of foyer into which
all the food packs before moving into the digestive system. (Brown Egg Blue Egg)

So you see my confusion.
This huge bolus of contradictory information presented as verified fact
really stuck in my craw (and that would be impacted crop, right?). In the end I digested (phew, all better!) all
of the information and just followed the course of treatment that made the most
sense to me. Here’s what I did:

First, I dumped out the antibiotic solution I
made.If this was truly a yeast
infection, antibiotics would only make it worse.

Then, I went to my local farm store and bought
copper sulfate.I live in the country
and the nearest farm store is 15 miles away.The only copper sulfate they had in stock was for treating swimming
pools—but copper sulfate is copper sulfate, it was just that it only came in 15
lb. containers.Since it was almost
closing time, I bought it.I have enough
copper sulfate to treat a gazillion chickens for a bazillion years!

I made a stock copper sulfate solution following
the formula in the Chicken Health Handbook.Then I added a tablespoon of stock solution and a tablespoon of vinegar
to a gallon of water.I gave this to
Roxie in a small plastic water font as her only source of water.Several days later, when the gallon of copper
sulfate water was gone I switched to water mixed with vinegar at a rate of one
tablespoon per gallon.

I did not ever give her yogurt.I will
never give a chicken yogurt, ever! I've already stated that I won't dispense advice since I'm not a vet or a chicken expert but come on! Mammals drink milk.Chickens are
birds.Chickens are lactose intolerant.While yogurt contains less lactose than many
dairy products, it still has waaay more lactose than a chicken can handle.I believe that probiotics are important for
chickens that are suffering from gastrointestinal illness, but the bacteria in yogurt aren’t necessarily the best choice for chickens.There are probiotics designed for chickens at
most stores that sell chicken feed, and I believe in the probiotic benefit of
good, clean dirt.I am pretty sure that there will be
a future post on this very subject.

I tried to get Roxie eating again by offering
small portions of a variety of soft treats such as mashed boiled eggs and
oatmeal.She wasn’t very
interested.Finally, on a nice, sunny
day about a week and a half after I first brought her into the basement, I took her outside and let
her wander on the lawn. She loved that! She happily stretched
out on the grass and spread her wings to soak up the sunshine.Then she started scratching and pecking at the
lawn and actually started eating bugs and worms and bits of dirt.That’s what
she was craving! It definitely is not the sort of diet normally recommended for a chicken recovering from sour crop, but it was long past time for Roxie to get some nutrition into her system, and she was not just tolerating pecking around the lawn--she was relishing it!That was the day I finally became sure that Roxie was going to get
better.

Roxie scratches, pecks, and regains her appetite

I continued her daily baths and Veterycin treatments until finally,
on the first day of September—two weeks after entering the basement infirmary,
I decided her lesions were nearly healed and I moved her back to the pole
barn. She’s not back in the coop yet, but is
living on her own. Every day I put her
outside in my small “chicken gazebo” so she can peck and scratch at the dirt to
her heart’s content. I put Willow the
Buff Orpington in the gazebo with her so she can have some company. She’s still not eating normally, but she’s
improving. She actually started eating
scratch grain a few days ago! And, good
news, her poop looks like normal chicken poop again! It’s getting to be that time of year when
chickens go through their fall molt. So
soon her lesions will be covered by a layer of new feathers. Long before that happens she’ll be back in
the coop with her friends. Roxie has
proven herself to be one tough little red hen, and life for Roxie goes on!

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Mission Statement

Hi! I’m Randy and this is my chicken blog. I write it, edit it, take the pictures, feed the chickens, hug the chickens, etc. I blog because a few years ago, I got these chickens…I had no idea when I got my first chickens that I would get attached to them and become this sentimental, crazy old chicken guy. I had no idea that each chicken would have its own personality, that chickens had such a huge range of vocalizations that they literally “talk” to each other, that they have this amazing, intricate social structure, or that there would be so much drama in the coop—love, conflict, friendship, sex, motherhood, anxiety—a virtual soap opera playing out before my eyes every day.

So I write these little vignettes about my birds that are mostly whimsical but also mostly true. In the process of telling my stories I also pass along a variety of views and opinions which are completely my own. Please also bear in mind that the information I share regarding my care of my chickens has come from my experience caring for my flock. I’m not a veterinarian and I have had no formal education in any kind of chickenology.

There are a few facts that I hope to get across to anybody who regularly reads my blog:

1.My chickens are really cool.

2.All chickens are really cool.

3.The majority of chickens being raised for meat or egg production, in spite of their inherent coolness, are treated cruelly. You can help make changes by your purchasing habits. Educate yourself! Read labels! Check company websites!